2015 is drawing to a close and with the advent of a new year there will be a few changes in your lives I’m guessing and most definitely in mine. This post will be the last one for this year 2015 but it also indicates an artistic change of direction for the upcoming year. Over the next couple of months, the links from the images to the online site Daily Paintworks will disappear. I may be starting a new account elsewhere but for now I am taking a hiatus from online sales.

I will be making art, of course, but am more interested in returning to my roots as a biologist and reviving my passion for field sketching in particular. It’s a passion from a time when I worked as park naturalist and my roommate for the summer was an artist who helped me see the joy in capturing and illustrating the observations I was making through sketching. Painting and sketching have been a constant in my life and so this is not a departure but rather just a re-emphasis.

I recommend it highly to anyone who would like to connect with ‘the creation’ through the ‘creation’ of sketches and illustrations of your own part of the planet. Maybe I’ll see you in the field with binoculars, camera, and sketch pad.

It’s still wet but it think it’s finished. The tea towel was just ‘hangin’ around so I grabbed it and added it to my little cardboard still life box. I really like the lines and how they move the eye through the painting. The pomegranate would be a bit of a red bulls eye otherwise! The nice thing about alla prima is that you can have a time limit on the work. Otherwise, I have been known to spend months on a piece. Think I’ll do a few more pomegranate paintings before Christmas–not for gifts–no… ‘just because’.

Pomegranates are in the stores and so before I eat this delicious Christmas treat, I have to draw it. The red colour of the pomegranate is so beautiful and shape feels so good in my hand. It’s begging to be painted. (charcoal on cartridge paper)